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A noun phrase – or NP or nominal (phrase) – is a phrase that usually has a noun or pronoun as its head, and has the same grammatical functions as a noun. [1] Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically , and they may be the most frequently occurring phrase type.
More generally the ending can be applied to noun phrases (as in the man you saw yesterday's sister); see below. The possessive form can be used either as a determiner (Manyanda's cat) or as a noun phrase (Manyanda's is the one next to Jane's). The status of the possessive as an affix or a clitic is the subject of debate.
Unlike other noun phrases which only have a single possessive form, personal pronouns in English have two possessive forms: possessive determiners (used to form noun phrases such as "her success") and possessive pronouns (used in place of nouns either as an object, as in "I prefer hers", or as a predicate pronoun, as in "the success was hers ...
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In grammatical analysis, most phrases contain a head, which identifies the type and linguistic features of the phrase. The syntactic category of the head is used to name the category of the phrase; [1] for example, a phrase whose head is a noun is called a noun phrase. The remaining words in a phrase are called the dependents of the head.
A noun phrase may have many modifiers, but only one determinative is possible. [1] In most cases, a singular, countable, common noun requires a determinative to form a noun phrase; plurals and uncountables do not. [1] The determinative is underlined in the following examples: the box; not very many boxes; even the very best workmanship
Another pre-head modifier of nouns is determiner phrases. For example, the determiner phrase two in the noun phrase these two images functions as a pre-head modifier. While determiners that occur before nouns tend to function as determinatives, noun phrases can contain only one determinative, so additional determiner phrases must have some ...
The gerund takes the same form (ending in -ing) as the present participle, but is used as a noun (or rather the verb phrase introduced by the gerund is used as a noun phrase). [23] Many uses of gerunds are thus similar to noun uses of the infinitive. Uses of gerunds and gerund phrases are illustrated below: As subject or predicative expression: